Instead of digging into the shaman logs which are really the only ones I'm capable of analyzing, I'll try and offer some general raid/guild leading advice.

The very first thing you need to decide, as the head honcho, is what kind of raid atmosphere you want. Do you want to be a casual fun guild that enjoys each other's company and might kill some stuff while you hang out or do you want to focus on killing bosses and hope you like the people you're doing it with? That may sound like a rough decision to make but it's important. Liking your fellow raiders is probably easier in 10m than 25m but I'd be willing to bet that in the best 10m guilds (Paragon excluded) not everyone is in love with everyone else. I know that's true in 25m raiding. The decision you make here will guide you through the next bit.

People that are in your guild right now and raiding with you will not be happy no matter which way you decide to go. That's ok. You need to get everyone together and let them know how it is. Give them permission to leave and find another place to raid or stick around a social members or fill in when needed, whatever. You just can't ever blend those two concepts successfully.

If you decide to be a social guild with relatively low raiding expectations, roll with it and relax. Keep killing stuff as it dies and try to enjoy the social part yourself.

It sounds like you're more leaning toward a more focused approach to raiding and that's where things get a little more challenging for you during what's likely to be a transition period. The first thing you need to do is set out a very clear cut set of expectations. They should include things like minimum effort that people are expected to put into the game to include various rep, enchants, consumables, consumable usage, class research, fight research, profession perks, timeliness and attendance standards, I could go on.

The people that are raiding with you now need to know that they're expected to start conforming to your new standards in a reasonable time frame and you have to check up on them. Go armory stalking and make a lot of notes. Council everyone as to where they stand in your eyes, what specific actions you need to see from each of them to prove they're making progress then go armory stalking again and follow up.

The other thing you need to do is a keep a roster bigger than 10. This will ruffle a feather but until you have 10 people that show up every single raid night without fail you're doomed to not raid or have to pug. I would guess that you need a roster of 12-13 to be able to raid every night you're supposed to raid. Explain why you're recruiting extra people and make sure that you rotate everyone in on farm content and pick the best comp for new bosses. Reassure everyone that no one is being surreptitiously replaced but at the same time it gives your roster a buffer so if people aren't following up with the expectations you've laid out, you can bring in the people that are performing. Right now you're sort of screwed because you have to bring who shows up. There's no external pressure on your current raid team to do better and it seems they're not pushing themselves.

Lead by example. If you're amazing and carrying the raid, it's ok to reward yourself for doing so. Make sure you're putting gear where it will make the most difference and honestly don't be too picky about being "fair" when you hand out loot. If the under-performing xyz hasn't gotten loot in three weeks and is up against your top dps for a piece, even if that player has been decked out, don't be afraid of the consequences to hand it to the top performer. When the low dps complains (and they always do!) point out all the things that you've talked about with him/her from all the previous paragraphs in this post and ask why that person isn't on board.

You're in a transition phase and if you're dedicated to making improvements to the raid team and talk to the people that want to make it better and get them on board with you then you'll make it happen together and be strong for it. You will lose some people and become less liked by a few. It's part of the joy of being in charge. The good news is that when you finally turn the corner and start making some solid progress it's extremely rewarding and you'll feel on top of the world.

"I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord. I'm from the planet Gallifrey in the Constellation of Kasterborous. I'm 903 years old and I'm the man who is gonna save your lives and all 6 billion people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?"

Thanks for the continued posts folks, I'd like to give some feedback when appropiate. I've been swarmed with things to do the last few days, but the new posts I read today have been very helpful and will contribute to our raid. Quick reply to a short post

Originally Posted by CptAwesome

All three of your Death Knights would benefit from a visit to theorycrafting sites.

Your tank has thrown away a ton of dodge and parry to get expertise capped.

One dps dk has converted all his expertise to haste and the other is a full percentage point below the hit cap.

The tank wants to maximise his scent of blood (based off successful hits) as well as contribute to raid dps. 10 man tank damage can no longer be ignored and this is something stated by the devs more than once. He takes a tiny bit of a survival loss which has not impacted any of our fights in any possible way.

The frost dk needs to work on his reforges, I'll assume he did them by himself instead of using assistance

The final dk is myself and I happen to be a draenei which I believe should cover the 1% hit you're looking for.

Thanks for your feedback though, haven't checked reforges for my team in a couple of weeks and the frost dk has made me aware that I need to do so. I plan on making a list of minor problems (reforges, enchants, whatever else) and giving a speech about how people need to think about their positions more seriously and to up their effort instead of being dependant on hand holding.

in your attempt you had two shadow priests but only one of them used VE. This is a crazy good raid CD on elegon due to the increased damage and healing buff and you should be using it. I generally use it during the first transition from P2->P1 and then again during the final burn phase. I contributed 4 million healing to the raid during our last heroic kill by using that CD alone.

Im not trying to be mean or derogatory here, but the simple fact is that most of your raiders are really really bad, I think almost everyone in your group is using incorrect stat weightings as well as missing enchants, Im sure that there rotations are completely off as well judging by the dps on the logs. And as other people mention deaths to random stupid stuff that is easily avoidable.

To get your raid group to a point where your even clearing all the normal modes is going to be monumental task requiring you to spend hours and hours helping each individual player, because from what I can see non of them really care if they are even vaguely doing the right thing. If you want to raid at a higher level I suggest you leave that guild unless you have days of time to put into it and even then players who don't care about what they are doing wrong rarely change.

The tank wants to maximise his scent of blood (based off successful hits) as well as contribute to raid dps. 10 man tank damage can no longer be ignored and this is something stated by the devs more than once. He takes a tiny bit of a survival loss which has not impacted any of our fights in any possible way.

The frost dk needs to work on his reforges, I'll assume he did them by himself instead of using assistance

The final dk is myself and I happen to be a draenei which I believe should cover the 1% hit you're looking for.

Thanks for your feedback though, haven't checked reforges for my team in a couple of weeks and the frost dk has made me aware that I need to do so. I plan on making a list of minor problems (reforges, enchants, whatever else) and giving a speech about how people need to think about their positions more seriously and to up their effort instead of being dependant on hand holding.

If tank survival is really not an issue then he could be doing a lot more to increase his dps, capping both hit and expertise is quite possible for him if he wants to go that route but at the moment he is in a sort of limbo between a mastery build and an accuracy one which is not going to give you consistency in the damage he takes/deals.

And yeah, I did miss the fact that you are a draenei. With regards to the rest of your team, I would highly suggest using your forum if you have one, or the guild info page to set up a guide to using Mr Robot, it's far from perfect but at your level it will at least get people on the right track. It's also the easiest way to check this kind of stuff for classes you are not familiar with, it's always hard to tell if someone is doing it right when you don't have an exemplar of that class.

I can sympathize with your position. I myself went into leading casual guilds as a former progress raider during Cata. It can be hard to get a group to the point where everyone is satisfied and noone overly frustrated. I'm a DPS myself and usually carrying the raid on my back until i tought most of the others how to deal with their classes, optimally they begin to challenge me. An example: we only recently downed Elegon (it only took us 20 tries or so, but we struggled with the right setup/activity for a while), and during the first set of tries people were panicking on sparks etc. During the kill we actually got 12 stacks (2x 6), and people were shocked they could pull it off.

Here's what i always go through with my slacking DPS:
- make sure they have correct enchants, gems and reforges (ask mr robot is awesome for this)
- make sure they know their rotations and have good addons (for beginners, stuff like CLC ret, CLC dk, shock and awe, etc...that show a priority window are great helps)
- make sure they are not keyboard turning and are actually using cooldown bursting macros as well as potions...believe me these simple things are usually what's lacking
- animate people to communicate openly and talk about problems they're having, usually some1 in the group or myself knows the immediate solution and it's solved (remind people to open their mouth, communication is critical)

For Elegon, we have 2 dps (me as enh and a hunter), our two highest, on the protector and the rest just nuking Elegon. I have to remind them to kill the 2nd protector first before switching phases ^^ For the sparks, make sure your tanks and healers are helping out as well if you#re struggling. Healing required during this phase is low, and tanks have nothing to do but dps. Let em burn minor DPS cooldowns on wave 3 / 4, spam preemptive aoe during wave 4 spawn, always set your tanks on each side on the spark of the lowest dps. And always remind people to move with their sparks and reset their stacks. Finally during the last burn phase make sure you cycle raid cooldowns, talk about the order before the try so people are clear about it. You don't want all healing and defensive cds blown at once.

Other people have done a good job analysing your logs, but I have a few bones to pick with your resto shaman.

First of all he's specced improperly for MsV, and honestly, for every fight except for Blade Lord Ta'yak.

He is taking Totemic Projection, Totemic Restoration will help his healing. He should be using this talent in tandem with the Glyph of Totemic Recall, which will allow him to recall all of his totems when their duration is about to end for full mana costs. Healing Stream Totem should be used on CD (30 seconds), which costs 14.4k mana, and being able to use it for free will save 30k mana per minute, that's a lot of mana.
Projection is better for Blade Lord, and Garalon (Maybe), otherwise he should be in range of enough people that the talent isn't very useful. If he wants it for Spirit Link Totem, it's easy to move to the tanks on every fight where it might be needed, and honestly, it shouldn't be needed.

2nd Talent issue. He's using Unleashed Fury, this would be okay usually, but 5.1 brought a bug to UF, it doesn't work with the Riptide HoT. It works with the initial heal, but none of the other healing, it also doesn't work with Healing Rain, so it's largely a useless talent. He should be using Prime Elementalist, and should be shooting for 30-35% uptime on his Elementals and their healing buff.

Glyphs:
Glyph of Water Shield is a net mana loss on nearly every fight. The only fights where it is not a loss are Stone Guard (A 479 mp5 increase), the last two fights in HoF (Both around 240 mp5 increase), and the first fight in ToES (A 91 mp5 increase). On every other fight, he's throwing away mana.

He needs Glyph of Totemic Recall, see my first issue with his talent selection.

He's logged out in his elemental gear, so I can't critique further, but make sure he's shooting for as close to 871 haste as possible while still remaining above it. After that, his stat priority is Spirit (to comfortable) > Int Mastery (to 50%) > Crit > Mastery = Spirit > Haste.

Looking at the most recent log that he participated in, his Healing Stream Totem uptime is looowww. He had 64 ticks on Stone Guard, out of a potential 97 (unreasonable, but 90 would be closer to ideal). On Feng, he had 42 ticks of a potential 107. On Gara'jal, he did a better, with 51 of 78. Spirit Kings was 81 out of 112. So basically he's missing 1/4 to 1/3 of the potential healing from Healing Stream Totem, and with the proper spec/glyph, those are free heals he's losing. It's anywhere from 10 to 20% of his total healing depending on the fight.

...That means he's missing 5% from his total healing, and those heals would cost no mana and be smart, so very little would be overheal. That's like a dps leaving an entire ability out of their rotation.

As far as Elegon goes, I didn't look too hard at your logs, but a few of your attempts were quite short, I assume because you're dying to Total Annihilation. Make sure people are resetting their stacks before it goes off, and that they're immediately going back onto the platform after the damage - the 50% buff to healing taken goes a long way in recovering from the damage. If you're losing tanks, remind them that AMS does work on Total Annihilation, because it's Arcane damage, so that will help them mitigate it. If you don't usually use two death knights, remind them to roll a CD if they're tanking during the Annihilate, otherwise healers are going to have a hard time dealing with the damage.

On your longer wipes, make sure that you're killing as many waves of the sparks as possible, but when you reach the point you can't kill more, that all your dps are on the boss. The raid-wide AoE that occurs when they die can hurt. Make sure dps are resetting their stacks between waves. Also consider saving Skull Banner / Stormlash Totem / Potions / 3 minute CDs etc (Yes, using a 3 minute CD to kill a spark is a good idea, 5% more damage from the entire raid will outweigh the damage from the 3 minute. Any dps who says otherwise is just meterwhoring.) to wipe out waves of sparks that begin to pose difficulty to you. When you enter the Pillar phase, bear in mind that the adds begin to spawn only once pillars are destroyed, so try and kill them all at the same time, so that you get as few as possible.

Thank you very much for the continued posts, they have been extremely helpful. I'll post some more bulletpoints for those who may be interested to see my responses to posts. I'll be making responses from the posts after my last set of replies.

- After talking it over, I do see the pestilence spreading being helpful - Especially if we try to push 5 orbs
- I will be trying to get our team to down all the pillars at the same time now, thanks for the advice on this everyone
- Gems and enchants - I have compiled a list of all my raiders for gems and enchants. I will let those who are not optimised know they need to do so, but I won't tell them what to do. I will check everyone in one week, in that time they are free to ask for suggestions. I will not hold anyones hand however, I want to see how seriously the raiders will take this. Anybody with a lazy attitude may have to rethink their position on the team.
- I plan on taking needless deaths much more seriously than I have done in the past. I will adopt our former raid leaders approach to deaths, which is to find out exactly what happened at the end of each fight (regardless of wipe or not) to make sure that if it was a careless mistake, it won't happen again
- I referred my boomkin to this giant post about dps rotation and he found it very useful. He realised he had been doing his opening wrong and since he is accustomed to healing, he wasn't using his cooldowns to their maximum potential. Thank you very much for this post on behalf of both of us
- I have made a long list of things my monk needs to do that he wasn't already doing. Thank you for all the posts made
- Most of the raiders are performing below what I know they are capable of doing. I'm just new to things to analyse and this thread has been very helpful in making me aware of things to check and things to look for on WoL. I have played with just about all of these raiders previously so I know their potential, we just have to raise the seriousness a notch. Our guild was pretty dead following the launch of Diablo 3 (it killed our raid team). The inactivity led me to strongly consider leaving the guild to join some friends with another guild. My girlfriend (chilly) was hesitant and told me to wait and see if people came back with the expansion. A lot of people came back, but not our guild leader or raid leader. I didn't want to give up on my guild (been here for 2 years now) or my friends here so I took charge of things and made the effort to form a new raid team. I've done too much to give up after a few poor performances. If the circumstances had been different, I'd have probably left by now.
- The tank isn't totally focused on expertise, it's mostly hit and mastery. We could look into a bit of haste, but for now I'm very happy with his performances.
- I haven't checked my shaman for a while since she plans on switching to a disc priest since she's not having so much fun right now. I've told her multiple times to use her healing steam on cooldown and I've told her to not use the water shield glyph or projection talent. I'm quite unhappy to find out that she hasn't done so, so I'll be sure to bring that to her attention.
- Our short raid attempts were when I called for wipes to avoid time being wasted. Usually if a third protector spawned or we didn't get enough adds down in part 2. Using cooldowns for adds is something I'm going to bring up in my raid speech, especially if we're trying to down 5 sets of adds.

Thank you once again for all of the helpful posts, I really do appreciate them.

I am just bookmarking this thread for the moment as I and the teams I am leading has some similar problems. Some people are underperforming at times, but the issue is that there is not a SINGLE person who is thea reason for our slow progress. Everybody has his flaws. So please please please keep the

general raid/guild leading advice

incomming. It is a really nice help/read and makes me understand what I need to discuss with my co-leaders.

I see there's already some decent replies here about the Monk, but if that turns out to not be enough then please do feel free to direct Leikai to the Monk forums on this website. We have a pretty decent community and there should be at least 1 or 2 helpful souls who can help out.

Tell him to bring along an armory link and world of logs link, just as you have (or he can direct us to this thread) and we'll be happy to help him out in a more direct manner.

Back in Karazhan, my first ever raid, we had a raid leader who would solve mechanic deaths in the following way:

He would plan an hour of what he called dancing lessons. We would tell people to not care about their DPS for an hour, if they want to, hit the same button for an hour, it didn't matter. All we were supposed to focus on, was where we should be standing and why. And everyone was allowed to speak during tries, so we would suddenly hear our mage go: WOW, if I stand here I hardly have to move at all. Then we knew we'd found a spot for our ranged. After an hour, people will know how to move, and you will find it comes naturally to them, they can focus on other things.

It sounds stupid, but to this day it's still more or less how I progress raid (don't tell my guildies . I'm tanking in a 25man group atm, and on new bosses I will spend the first hour or so not worrying about when to exactly pop what cooldowns or w/e. My standard rotation is more or less muscle memory, and I just ram it while I focus solely on where I should be standing and how I should be moving. It works like a charm.

In case of your group I would recommend some Youtubing, as anyone that hasn't read the theorycraft at this point is probably not going to really read it at all. There's pretty decent videos out there that explain rotations and stuff, and this is a much better way to learn for most casuals. Then kindly ask them to do some work on a training dummy to see how the mechanics of their class interact in a proper rotation, and you should be good to go.

As far as people getting killed by Flanking Orders; unless you're doing some kind of charity thing for blind kids this makes 0 sense, it's an easier mechanic than most 5man heroics.

---------- Post added 2013-01-02 at 02:38 PM ----------

Oh and if you're getting a new tank, try to get a warrior, he will bring some nice utility to your raid in the form of banners, safeguards and all that other trickery. Plus, blood DKs are terrible for melee fights so you could use a nice block tank

too much info i can only make some general comments to help out.
assuming its going pretty bad which it seems like it people would have to improve on so many things id have a hard time guiding them through rather than simply finding replacements for them. they should be interested in the game and figuring out this kind of stuff on their own, thats what gaming is about to me. so if you can identify those people in your group, keep them since they will continously improve and you wont be burdened by that too much.

some people are simply gonna be doing so many things wrong, you can sort them into 3 groups. the ones that die a lot, fail at understanding the mechanics or otherwise playing the actual raid. those that are weak players in terms of class, gear, mentality. and finally those that are both.
i recently made a mistake not removing a player who failed at both and i still regret not kicking him immediately, weeks later. if you are going to be setting goals and going for performance then you use that as your main criteria and handle your players accordingly.

you can attempt to help or get the first two groups help in order to improve. both need different approaches.
the bad raider might need to be more attentive and understanding of the team play of the raid and what is actually important for him to contribute. hopefully making him enjoy this process and allow him to pursue excelling at this himself.
the bad player needs to firstly become a non bad player which i believe is achieved by force. they do so many things objectively wrong, things that are easy to fix like gameplay mechanics, reading up on stats, trying out stuff, spending time on the dummy, practicing, making calculations what not. if they dont make such an effort in the area where they lack you would have to remove them. (note if they are slack with consumables they need to learn to make gold) when they stop being bad they can become a reliable player, that is until you get to more challenging content.

at this point i would evaluate how bad the situation is before actually doing anything, what i personally want out of the game, if its even possible to execute this plan of having other players improve and then decide if i want to pursue these actions or if im going to quit myself and go elsewhere. id rather not be in control but play with people i know i can trust (aka i cant play their class better than them which is pretty much my subjective criteria). this also alleviates a lot of burden on me, while these organize things are fun it also takes away from other things i could be doing instead.

it is my believe that if you want to have fun with all the normal modes and either do heroic modes later on or allow your group to develop into heroic mode quality the biggest contributing factor is the overall quality of each individual member. imagine you have 9 other players that simply own, you are gonna have a great time playing this game. it also fixes part of the attendence issue which is that if 2 of those players dont show up, the rest is good enough to carry lesser players and not have the group be affected. if you are balancing on barely being able to kill bosses, having one person not show up and having to take a lesser player can be the difference in not being able to kill it as well, wiping, and overall having a much less fun time.

lastly i seriously advise against reading into other peoples classes too much, even if you learn you would have to teach them and then you are still dependent on them actually doing it well. for your ability to determine how good someone is or how severe their flaws are, it can be worthwhile but in order to teach them and make them change it most certainly is not.

Bit of an update for those who may be interested. Our team has shifted a bit and I believe its for the better. Our monk healer has switched to tank and our shaman healer has switched to a disc priest. We had a paladin healer from heroic dragon soul last year who stopped raiding with us so he could pursue a girl. He has been able to make time and is filling the monks heal spot. I had individual chats with most of our members and all of them were receptive to what I had to say, especially the monk.

To cut a long story short, we killed Elegon last night which I believe is largely due to the contributions of people who posted in this thread, so thank you once again for all the help you provided.

Bit of an update for those who may be interested. Our team has shifted a bit and I believe its for the better. Our monk healer has switched to tank and our shaman healer has switched to a disc priest. We had a paladin healer from heroic dragon soul last year who stopped raiding with us so he could pursue a girl. He has been able to make time and is filling the monks heal spot. I had individual chats with most of our members and all of them were receptive to what I had to say, especially the monk.

To cut a long story short, we killed Elegon last night which I believe is largely due to the contributions of people who posted in this thread, so thank you once again for all the help you provided.

I'm not a big fan of using gcd count to judge windwalkers in general, since it's not optimal to have enough haste to use all gcds all the time (you have to waste a lot of resources most of the time to be able to fill all gcds at the most resource-poor times). However, in this case it's relevant since the large amount of spare gcds disproves my theory that the chi capping is simply a matter of prioritizing energy over chi.

(In my previous comments I only looked at the Elegon wipes and didn't check anything related to total time.)

Yes and no - depending on the fight. I'm typically GCD capped at 3700 haste (I've not been able to get it lower than that) on Patchwerk fights with Energizing Brew and Fists of Fury. That said, in the 8 min Elegon attempt, he did use EB 8 times, which is good, but - with that much haste, I can't imagine how. In addition, he neglects FoF, which can be useful during the burn phases and scales remarkably well with haste and crit as of 5.1.

But it really comes down to the fact that he has his stat priority down - at his gear level, crit > haste, and he should be trying to get his 2 set (saving 4set for heroics, if he finds that it works better for him - secondaries over the 4set bonus.)

As others have said, though, he should post in the Monk forum. He'll get many opinions and should be able to find what works. Plus, EJ's WW guide is current, so he will also find that useful.